ANYONE UP FOR A MICHAEL SHELLEY POST-DISTORTION AU IN THE BIG 26 ?????
Aka my friends finally convinced me to post this
These are just quick sketches to get the idea across, I will draw much better things for this later
yapping and explanation under the cut !!!!
Okay! SO.
While Michael may have come back from the Distortion, he most definitely did not come back unchanged.
Perhaps the most noticeable change is his skin. It looks as if it were stretched much farther than it should've been, and in an attempt to appear like a regular person again, the skin was scrunched back together by winding it up real tight. This leaves large twisting creases up his arms, legs, and neck. This also causes increased sensitivity and risk of injury due to his skin being a bit thinner than it should be.
> He attempts to cover his markings up, meaning he is almost always wearing scarves and/or turtlenecks, long pants, long sleeves, and even gloves! weep for him in the summertime.
Another big difference is his eyes. His pupils may look only a bit odd from afar, though upon closer inspection you can see they take the form of a fractal. Irises are somewhat blurry, blending into the eyewhites and shifting colors. Everyone who sees him will see his eyes as a different shade, though it's usually a light cool tone.
> Along with his eyes changing, so have his glasses. That means that, at least for now, the lenses he wore in the Distortion are the only ones that will work for him. Shame that one lens is broken.... at least his prescription isn't too high! He can see somewhat well without his glasses, but on top of the normal blurriness the glasses were originally for, now his sight on it's own is just distorted and wrong enough to be a bit disorienting, like watching a 3d movie without the fancy 3d glasses on. It's less headache inducing just to wear the previous glasses, even if they're cracked.
> Through the lenses of his glasses he can see more than is normal. Not to a great extent, and it may just be instincts and feelings of his and not his actual sight at all. But it feels like sight. He can literally see through lies (as in he can detect that someone is lying, not see the actual truth), sense paranoia and mental instability around a person, and can generally see connections to the Spiral as an aura around the person or thing. He can also see things' connections to other Fears, though less well and less reliably. He can see if something is connected to a different Fear if the connection is extremely strong, like a very powerful avatar or an old building/location, but if the connection isn't extremely strong it can be much more difficult to see, and it is always hard to tell exactly which Fear something connects to if it is not the Spiral. Though, even if the connection is very strong, his sight can still be unreliable, as he may not realise the aura around the thing is a connection to a Fear and may assume it to simply be a bad feeling or paranoia. He can almost perfectly detect the Spiral's presence however. Human(?) lie detector! Kinda. This may give him a connection to the Eye as well (he was probably a bit connected before, as he worked for the institute, and I plan for him to still work for or at least be connected to the institute in this au), though it is not meant to be an Eye-aligned ability.
His hair, skin, eyes, and the clothing he wore in the Distortion is now a much more vibrant color. He rarely wears his old clothes, so really only the hair and skin is noticeable. His hair is blonde, yes, but in a way that almost looks yellow, so you may assume it to be dyed. Over time it grows out to be a more natural color, but it never really goes back to normal. All this combined gives him a somewhat fake appearance, as if he isn't real.
> There is also a slight fuzziness to him, making him look even less real. A kind of fogginess around the edges, though this doesn't happen often and is only noticeable sometimes.
Now this doesn't have to do with post-distortion specifically, but a headcanon of mine is that after Michael was fed to the Distortion, not only was his body and mind altered, but so was everyone's ideas and memories of him. Everyone who knew him has the same idea of what he looks like, fairly tall, skinny, with long blonde curly hair, but was his hair a very light blonde or more dirty blonde? How tall was he, exactly? Someone who is 6'0 may remember him as a bit taller than them, while someone 5'11 may remember him as shorter than them, which one is right? Were his eyes a solid light blue, or more green tinted? Or even gray? What color were his glasses? Did he even wear glasses? What shape was his face? Every little bit of information is wobbly and shifting and distorted, so that someone who knew him before the Distortion may not even recognise him now, especially with the other changes the Distortion made. This is also my explanation for the conflicting information in the canon timeline if you couldn't tell.
There are also MANY mental effects that have happened as a result to the Distortion. Of course, I will never pass up a chance to project my give a character horrible dissociation and horrible identity issues! Yay! He has also became very very wary of trusting people, which is both due to constantly questioning his reality in the Distortion, but also due to Gertrude's betrayal. I will touch on more mental issues specifically later !!!
I plan to turn this au into a fic (which I wrote the first chapter of, and then immeditely scrapped it because I thought of a better way to start it), that also includes some ocs of mine that I may eventually post about! If/when I post the fic I will reblog this post with a link :] For now the most stuff I will do for this au is write when the motivation allows me and draw whenever I'm bored. Oooooohhh I could make a comic too.... we'll see !
I love the malevolent fandom because you'll see the reactions to the latest episode and everyone sobbing and crying and going feral and think no way could it possibly be thaaat bad and then you listen and it Is That Bad. It is Always That Bad. How is it That Bad.
Oh my goodness thinking back to the episode before this and Adam's ringtone (while Sydney was calling him) being Baby Hotline... now knowing Sydney's backstory (and comparing it to the meaning of the song)???? auauegegagahhhh BBLLUUEEE CUURRSSEE YOOOUUUUUU
You know the episode is crazy when it's got me pacing around the living room chanting "my yaoi... my yaoi..... it's so toxic..... my yaoi....." at 12:39 at night
